RECENT research on grilling rather than roasting lamb leg cuts has highlighted avenues for food service and sheep breeders to improve consumers’ eating experiences.

Grilled lamb leg cuts scored significantly higher with consumers than roasted cuts for all three muscles across all sensory traits in research conducted at the University of New England.

UNE Associate Professor – Meat Science – Dr Peter McGilchrist said the research show that the eating experience with lamb leg cuts is better when they are grilled.

“This research has really challenged our commonly held idea that lamb leg cuts should be roasted – Australian consumers tell us they like it grilled much better.

“The knuckle in lambs eats almost on par as the loin. That’s a great outcome for the lamb industry. Maybe they are under priced at present?”

The research has demonstrated the huge impact that cooking methods and different cuts have on the tenderness, juiciness, and flavor of lamb leg muscles.

“The results of this study provide the opportunity to develop better eating quality prediction models for specific cuts with changing cooking methods.

“The MSA sheepmeat eating quality model will be enhanced by these results, allowing greater extraction of value for cuts for specific cooking methods,” the researchers led by Hussein Al-Moadhen said in the final report.

“The results also showed that all sensory scores for all cuts by different cooking methods were positively impacted by higher intramuscular fat percentage and negatively impacted by higher shear force.

“GR fat had a positive but smaller impact on the tenderness and juiciness of the grilled and roasted outside flat and topside only.”

The researchers said the results also support the immense importance of selecting animals with higher IMF% and lower shear force to generate a greater eating quality experience for consumers, which ultimately leads to greater extraction of value for the supply chain.

“The mechanisms causing the differences between cuts are unclear, but might be caused by the collagen content, IMF%, or other intrinsic factors such as sarcomere lengths.

“These factors can impact the cooking process under different cooking methods and, therefore, impact sensory scores.”

The researchers said further research is required to determine the influence of other cooking methods on a wider variety of cuts to understand the sensory attributes which are impacted by cooking method.

“In conclusion, hind leg cuts that have been traditionally roasted from lambs have an improved eating quality when grilled.”

In the study report, ‘Quantifying the Effect of Grilling and Roasting on the Eating Quality of Lamb Leg Muscles by Hussein Al-Moadhen’ the researchers said lamb eating quality was measured using untrained consumer sensory panels to determine the difference in intrinsic eating quality scores of grilled and roasted leg cut muscles.

The knuckle, outside flat, and topside from both legs of 65 mixed-sex lambs from diverse genetic backgrounds were prepared using alternative grill and roast cook methods. Each sample was eaten by 10 consumers and scored for tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and overall liking. All cuts scored higher (p < 0.001) when grilled compared with when roasted for all traits except for topside tenderness. Grilled knuckle scored higher than roast knuckle by 13.6 percent, 23.9pc, 14.4pc and 15.8pc for tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and overall liking, respectively. The grilled outside flat scored higher than roast outside flat by 14.1pc, 27.1pc, 10.9pc, and 14.3pc for tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and overall liking, respectively. Finally, grilled topside scored higher than roast topside by 21.3pc, 7.4pc, and 6.6pc for juiciness, flavor, and overall liking, respectively.

Carcass traits for intramuscular fat and shear force had a significant (p < 0.001) effect on all eating quality traits for both grill and roast cuts. Girth rib fat had a significant effect (p = 0.01) on tenderness and juiciness (p = 0.03) for outside flat and topside, but had no effect (p > 0.05) on knuckle for both grill and roast. This study identified that specific cooking methods can improve sensory traits for individual cuts and suggests that a cut-by-cook method eating quality model for sheep meat can therefore increase consumer satisfaction, the report said.